The First Address

July 3, 2002

This was the first speech that Swami Vivekananda addressed in the

Parliament of Religions in Chicago :

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the

warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. l thank you in the

name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in

the name of the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of

the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who,

referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these

men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to

different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a

religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal

acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we

accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which

has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and

all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have

gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came

to the southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in

which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I

am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still

fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote

to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have

repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by

millions of human beings:

"As the different streams having there sources in different places

all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths

which men take through different tendencies, various though they

appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies

ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world, of

the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita:

"Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men

are struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me."

Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have

long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with

violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed

civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for

these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than

it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell

that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-

knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with

the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending

their way to the same goal.

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Why we disagree I will tell you a little story. You have heard the

eloquent speaker who has just finished say, "Let us cease from

abusing each other," and he was very sorry that there should be

always so much variance.

But I think I should tell you a story which would illustrate the

cause of this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there

for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet was

a little, small frog. Of course, the evolutionists were not there

then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but, for our

story's sake, we must take it for granted that it had its eyes, and

that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli

that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern

bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and

fat. Well, one day another flog that lived in the sea came and fell

into the well.

"Where are you form?I am from the sea.The sea! How big is that?

Is it as big as my well?" and he took a leap from one side of the

well to the other. "My friend," said the frog of the sea, "how do you

compare the sea with your little well?" Then the frog took another

leap and asked, "Is your sea so big?What nonsense you speak, to

compare the sea with your well!Well, then," said the frog of the

well, "nothing can be bigger than my well; there can be nothing

bigger than this; this fellow is a liar, so turn him out."

That has been the difficulty all the while. I am a Hindu. I am

sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my

little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the

whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and

thinks that is the whole world. l have to thank you of America for

the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this

little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will

help you to accomplish your purpose.

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Paper on Hinduism.

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us

from time prehistoric- Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. They

have all received tremendous shocks, and all of them prove by their

survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb

Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-

conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to

tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India

and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very

foundations, but like the waters of the sea-shore in a tremendous

earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-

absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult

of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed and

assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.

From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of

which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low

ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of

the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place

in the Hindus's religion.

Where then , the question arises, where is the common centre to

which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common

basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest?

And this is the question I shall attempt to answer.

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the

Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without

end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be

without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They

mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by

different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation

existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot

it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The

moral, ethical and spiritual relations between soul and soul and

between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits were there

before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them

as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the

very greatest of them were women. Here it may be said that these laws

as laws be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas

teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said

to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the

same. Then if there was a time when nothing exists, where was all

this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God.

In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which

would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and

everything compound must undergo that change which is called

destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never

was a time when there was no creation.

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two

lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each

other. God is the ever-active providence, by whose power systems

after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time,

and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every

day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons

of previous cycles." And this agrees with modern science.

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my

existence, "I,""I,","I," what is the idea before me? The idea of a

body. Am I , then , nothing but a combination of material substances?

The Vedas declare, "No." I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the

body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this body;

it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul

was not created, for creation means a combination, which means a

certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must

die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health with beautiful body,

mental vigour, and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable;

some are without hands or feet; others again are idiots, and only

drag on a wretched existence. Why , if they are all created, why does

a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is

He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that

those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one.

Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and

merciful God?

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the

anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful

being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a

man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.

Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by

inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence- one of

the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations

answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the

existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been

evolved out of matter; and if a philosophical monism is inevitable,

spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a

materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity,

but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration through

which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are

other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by his past actions. And a

soul with a certain tendency would, by the laws of affinity, take

birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of

that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to

explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So

repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a newborn

soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they

must have come down from past lives.

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it

that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily

explained . I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue; in

fact, no words of my mother tongue are now present in my

consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in.

That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental

ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try

and struggle, they would come up, and you would be conscious even of

your past life.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the

perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the

world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very

depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up - try it and you

would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot

pierce - him the fire cannot burn - him the water cannot melt - him

the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle

whose circumference is nowhere but whose centre is located in the

body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to

body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter . In its very

essence, it is free, unbounded, holy , pure, and perfect. But somehow

or other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself as

matter.

Why should the free, perfect and pure being be thus under the

thralldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul

be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect ? We have been told

that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can

be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by posting one or more

quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the

gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How

can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the

absolute change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the

Hindu is sincere He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He

is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and his

answer is : " I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the

soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and

conditioned by matter." But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a

fact in everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the

body. The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the

body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This

is nothing more than what the Hindu says, " I do not know."

Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal , perfect and

infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to

another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the

future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting

back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another

question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the

foamy crest of a billow and bashed down into a yawning chasm the

next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions - a

powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing ,

uncompromising current of cause and effect - a little moth placed

under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in

its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry ? The

heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of nature. Is there no

hope? Is there no escape? - was the cry that went up from the bottom

of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of

hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he

stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad

tidings: "Hear , ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside

in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all

darkness , all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from

death over again.Children of immortal bliss" - what a sweet, what

a hopeful name! Allow me to call you brethren, by that sweet name -

heirs of immortal bliss- yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners.

We are the children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and

perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth - sinners! It is a sin to call

a man so; it is standing libel on human nature. Come up , O lions,

and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls

immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are

not bodies; matter is your servant not you the servant of matter.

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of

unforgiving laws, no an endless prison of cause and effect, but that

at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of

matter and force, stands One, "by whose command the wind blows, the

fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth". And

what is His nature ? He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the

Almighty and the All-merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our

mother, Thou art our beloved friend. Thou art the source of all

strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of

the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang

the Rishis of the Veda. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He is

to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this

and the next life."

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see

how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna whom the Hindus

believe to have been God incarnate on earth.

He taught that a man ought to live in this like a lotus leaf, which

grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to

live in the world - his heart to God and his hands to work.

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world,

but it is better to love God for love's sake; and the prayer

goes: "Lord , I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it

be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth; but grant me this, that

I may love Thee without the hope of reward - love unselfishly for

love's sake", One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of

India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take

shelter with his queen, in a forest in the Himalayas and there one

day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men,

should suffer so much misery. Yudhisthira answered , "Behold my

queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them.

They do not give me anything but my nature is to love the grand, the

beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly , I love the Lord. He is

the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to

be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not

pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me

wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in

love."

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of

matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the

word they use for it is , therefore Mukti - freedom from the bonds of

imperfection, freedom from death and misery. And this bondage can

only fall of through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on the

pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy

act? He reveals Himself to the pure Heart; the pure and the stainless

see God, yea even in this life; then only all the crookedness of the

heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the

freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very center, the

very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live

upon words and theories. If there are existence's beyond the ordinary

sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there

is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful

universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, and that

alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives

about the soul, about God , is : "I have seen the soul; I have seen

God." And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu

religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a

certain doctrine or dogma, but in realizing - not in believing, but

in being and becoming.

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to

become perfect, to become divine, to reach God, and see God; and this

reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in

Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection ? He lives a

life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having

obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely

God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all

the sects of India; but then perfection is absolute, and the absolute

cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an

individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must

become one with Brahman, and it would only realize the Lord as the

perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the

existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have

often and often read this called the losing of individuality and

becoming a stock or a stone. "He jests at scars that never felt a

wound." I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to

enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater

happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of

happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number

of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness, being reached when it

would become a universal consciousness.

Therefore , to gain this infinite universal individuality, this

miserable little prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death

cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am

one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I am

one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific

conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a

delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing

body in an unbroken ocean of matter, and Advaita (unity) is the

necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, Soul.

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would

reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it

would reach the goal. Thus chemistry could not progress farther when

it would discover one element out of which all others could be made.

Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in

discovering one energy of which all the others are but

manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when it

would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him

who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world, One who is the

only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is

it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is

reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all

sciences.

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run.

Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today; and

the Hindu is only glad that what he has been chirishing in his bosom

for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language and with

further light from the latest conclusions of science.

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of

the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is

no "polytheism" in India. In every temple, if one stands by and

listens, one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of

God, including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor

would the name henotheism explain the situation. "The rose, called by

any other name, would smell as sweet.". Names are not explantions.

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a

crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was,

that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it

do ? One of his hearers sharply answered ,"If I abuse your God, what

can He do? "You would be punished," said the preacher, "when you

die.So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the Hindu.

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that

are called idolaters, men, the like of whom, in morality and

spirituality and love, I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask

myself, "Can sin beget holiness?"

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does

a Christian go to church ? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face

turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the

Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of

Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about

anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing.

By the law of association the material image calls us the mental idea

and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses and external symbol when

he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed on the

Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is

not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how much does omnipresence

mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol.

Has God superficial area ? If not , when we repeat that

word "omnipresent", we think of the extended sky, or of space - that

is all.

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental

constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the

image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our

idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross.

The Hindus have associated the ideas of holiness, purity,truth,

omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms.

But with this difference that while some people devote their whole

lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with

them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and

doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is

centred in realization. Man is to become divine by realizing the

divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports,

the helps, of his spiritual childhood; but on and on he must

progress.

He must not stop any where. "External worship, material worship," say

the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental

prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has

been realized." Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the

idol tell you, " Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the

stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as

fire; through Him they shine." But he does not abuse any one's idol

or call its worship sin. He recognizes in it a necessary stage of

life. "The child is father of the man." Would it be right for an old

man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

If a man can realize his divine nature with the help of an image,

would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed

that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not

travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower

to higher truth. To him all the religions >from the lowest fetishism

to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to

grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of

its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of

progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher,

gathering more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized

it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to

force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat

which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit

John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The

Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized , or

thought of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses,

and crescents are simply so many symbols- so many pegs to hang

spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary to

everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that is

wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything

horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is

the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The

Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but

mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never

for cutting throats of their neighbours If the Hindu fanatic burns

himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition. And

even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than

the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.